Set art free | 10 March 2012

Let’s not waste more millions ‘saving’ Old Masters

Last week the National Gallery and National Gallery of Scotland proudly announced that they had jointly raised £45 million to buy Titian’s ‘Diana and Callisto’ from the Duke of Sutherland, thereby ‘saving it for the nation’. A few days before, Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism announced that it would be blocking export licences for various exhibits due to be displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum. The Turks said they would not release the artifacts until items in UK and US museums excavated in Anatolia during the 19th century were returned to the Turkish state.

What links these two apparently unrelated events is a single, highly questionable principle: cultural nationalism. Nations and institutions will go to enormous lengths to prevent the ‘loss’ of art and artifacts overseas — and to recover those that have been exported in the past. But why should tens of millions be spent in order that a Titian should hang in a gallery in London or Edinburgh as opposed to, say, the Escorial in Madrid (for which it was originally painted), or a museum in the United States, which would be the most likely buyer on the open market? Or why should the ­British Museum’s exhibition Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam be derailed in order that a classical stele should stand in Istanbul rather than London?

The usual answer is that the artifacts so dearly bought — or so obstreperously demanded back — represent an inalienable, unique part of the nation’s cultural heritage. In the case of the Titian and its pair, ‘Diana and Actaeon’ (together bought for a total of £95 million, an estimated third of their market value) the argument is that the paintings have inspired generations of British artists ever since they went on public display.